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Sunday, May 26, 2024

Links - 26th May 2024 (1 - General Wokeness)

Iconic Bluey cricket episode is accused of promoting 'genocide' by Muslim poet Omar Sakr - "Omar Sakr published a poem called 'Bluey in the genocide' on Wednesday, taking aim at the show's iconic 'Cricket' episode which features a character's father serving in the Australian Army. The plot centres around a Queensland family of cartoon dogs underestimating the ability of Bluey's friend Rusty on the cricket pitch. Rusty's father is absent in the episode until the end, when he pens a letter to his son from an unknown battlefield while wearing camouflage. Mr Sakr, a Muslim novelist, wrote that the episode, which originally aired in June, 2022, was enjoyable until he realised Rusty's father was 'putting down Arabs'."
The lady doth protest too much, methinks

Academics defend Cambridge 'race row' professor's right to free speech - "Philosophy researcher Nathan Cofnas is facing expulsion from Emmanuel College and is under investigation by the Faculty of Philosophy and the Leverhulme Trust, which provided him with a research grant."
Academic freedom only applies if you push the left wing agenda. Weird how Priyamvada Gopal's racism was rewarded with a promotion - hating white people gets you plaudits in academia

Meme - "CHEAPCAFFEINE.NET BY NATHAN SHUMATE
Clarice measuring Annabeth and Corey, with Corey being taller: "NOPE, IT'S CLEAR! ANNABETH IS TALLER!
Corey: "WAIT, WHAT?"
Annabeth: "THANK YOU, CLARICE."
Corey: "HOW CAN YOU LOOK AT THE STICK THAT YOU'RE HOLDING AND SAY SHE'S TALLER?"
Clarice: "WHAT, ARE YOU INVALIDATING ANY MEASUREMENTS YOU DON'T MAKE YOURSELF? CONVENIENT, THAT."
Annabeth: "STOP DISCOUNTING MY LIVED EXPERIENCE, COREY."
Clarice: "AND STOP TRYING TO DOMINATE WITH STATURIST RHETORIC, COREY."
Annabeth: "IT'S TYPICAL OF MALE FRAGILITY THAT WE CAN'T HAVE AN OPEN DIALOGUE ABOUT YOUR OVERVALUED HEIGHT SUPREMACY."
Corey: "I DIDN'T CARE -- YOU'RE THE ONES WHO WANTED TO MEASURE MEI"
Clarice: "OOH, LOOK WHO'S STARTING TO GET ALL ANGRY AT THE CHALLENGE TO HIS HEIGHT PERCEPTION."
Annabeth: "CHECK YOUR PRIVILEGE, COREY."

Meme - Commie Gibberish of the Day: "You see son, back in my day women were allowed to be hot in movies, videogames, and media, and nobody got offended. Well, f*t c*ws did of course, but we didn't care about what they said, and oddly the world didn't explode or something."
LearningTheLaw @Mangalawyer: "Ubisoft transformed a beautiful female model (Humberly Gonzales) into literally a broom for Star Wars Outlaws"

Thread by @aaronsibarium on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - " THREAD: Certain people on this website keep claiming that the anti-woke movement—and in particular anti-woke Jews—have abandoned their commitment to free speech and are now demanding DEI-style censorship of views they find offensive.  The truth is almost the opposite.🧵 Today the editors of Tablet Magazine—a Jewish, Zionist, and vociferously anti-woke publication—put out an editorial lambasting efforts to police speech in the name of protecting Jews.  The editorial is literally titled, "Not In Our Name." Tablet's editors attack a bipartisan bill that would allow the Department of Education to impose “third-party antisemitism monitors" on any federally-funded university.  "This is lunacy," they write. "No one should support it."  Doesn't sound very pro-censorship to me.
What about Bari Weiss, the subject of so many (bad faith) accusations of hypocrisy? Writing for Tablet in November, she urged Jews to reject the entire DEI apparatus.  Don't "beg for a higher ranking in the new ladder of victimhood," she wrote.  What about Bari Weiss's anti-woke publication, the Free Press? By my count it has published at least three articles since Oct. 7 defending the free speech rights of anti-Semites and pushing back against demands for censorship. The first piece, by Pamela Paresky and former ACLU president Nadine Strossen, was titled, "Even Antisemites Deserve Free Speech." It noted that Weimar Germany's hate speech laws did not arrest, and arguably helped facilitate, the rise of the Third Reich.
The second piece, by the Manhattan Institute's Ilya Shapiro, noted that even calls for genocide are protected by the First Amendment and stated outright: "We shouldn’t weaken speech protections."
And the third piece, by Jenin Younes and Christopher Rufo—yes, that Chris Rufo, the consigliere to Ron DeSantis who helped mastermind all the anti-DEI legislation—slammed the Antisemitism Awareness Act as a "profoundly misguided" extension of DEI. Rufo also criticized an executive order from Texas Governor Greg Abbot—who has signed many of Rufo's signature initiatives into law—that instructs universities to "update" their free speech policies to ban "antisemitic speech."
What about anti-woke billionaires like Bill Ackman who went after their alma maters in the wake of October 7?  Here's Ackman opposing the new antisemitism act on free speech grounds.  "We should not impair free speech. We should simply enforce the law." Ackman is endorsing a tweet by Batya Ungar-Sargon—a staunch defender of Israel and fierce critic of recent campus protests—who also opposes the act.  "This congressional bill to expand the definition of antisemitism is bad for the U.S. and bad for Jews."
And what about Elon Musk, the richest and maybe the most outspoken billionaire in the world?  Here he is raising concerns about the Antisemitism Awareness Act. Musk is retweeting a monologue by Matt Walsh—a columnist at the staunchly Zionist Daily Wire, which some people say fired Candace Owens because she was "critical of Israel" (lol)—attacking the Antisemitism Awareness Act.
All of which is to say: If Bari Weiss, Bill Ackman, Chris Rufo, Elon Musk, Nadine Strossen, Matt Walsh, Ilya Shaprio, Batya Ungar-Sargon, and the editors of Tablet Magazine all oppose something, it is simply an abuse of language to claim that the anti-woke movement supports it. There are of course many people opposed to wokeness, and not all of them share the same view of, say, the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism. (Tablet supports this aspect of the Antisemitism Awareness Act; Rufo and Younes oppose it.) But as a general matter, the most prominent critics of wokeness have not succumbed to the censorship temptation—at least nowhere near to the same degree as the woke themselves.  Other consistent voices include Jason Willick, Robby Soave, and Greg Lukianoff, to name just a few.
By contrast, the protests on college campuses since October 7 have repeatedly violated OTHERS' rights to speak and listen.  At Columbia and Stanford, for example, several protests derailed classes and university events even before the more disruptive encampments got underway. And the protesters—let's be honest—do not by and large believe in free speech. How many members of the tentifada oppose Biden's new Title IX regulations, which will effectively ban "misgendering" on college campuses, for example? How many of them oppose the University of Pennsylvania's efforts to sanction Amy Wax, a tenured law professor, for her controversial remarks about race and immigration? How many of them oppose the Biden administration's efforts to censor "disinformation"? How many of them know, much less care, that the Biden administration sent a man to jail for making memes?
You can of course find plenty of hypocrites in the anti-woke crowd. But the idea that the protesters' critics are more hypocritical—or bigger threats to free speech—than the protesters themselves, is hard to square with the available evidence."
More Jews who are not unconditionally pro-Israel and who want to outlaw criticism of Jews/Israel
I saw anti-Semites claiming Matt Walsh was just a sop for Ben Shapiro to pretend that he supported free speech

Swann Marcus on X - "The craziest progressives are college students in tents and the craziest Republicans are Christian Nationalist QAnon supporters who the GOP nominates to run for Secretary of State of Arizona so he can help Trump steal the 2024 election if he loses I rest my case"
Daniel Friedman on X - "The craziest progressives routinely hold endowed chairs, head diversity bureaucracies within major institutions, run HR for Fortune 500 companies, publish op-eds in the New York Times, and run massive nonprofits like the Ford Foundation."

Police shoot dead 16yo armed with a knife in Perth, premier suggests teen was radicalised online - ""Members of the WA Muslim community, who were concerned by his behaviour, contacted police prior to the incident and I thank them for their help."  It was also said the boy's family was cooperating with police.  Commissioner Blanch said the incident was not being labelled as a terrorist attack at this stage.  "It certainly has the hallmarks of one [but] the reason why I would declare it as a terrorist act going forward — it's about timing," Commissioner Blanch said... "[The program is] for those that are exhibiting behaviours that might be religious or issues motivated.  "This 16-year-old Caucasian male was part of that program."... The Imam of Perth's largest mosque, the Nasir Mosque, Imam Syed Wadood Janud said he condemned the knife attack "in the strongest terms".  "In the Muslim community we live by the model love for all, hate for none," he said.  "We not only condemn this in the harshest terms possible but we would also like to mention that Islam has nothing to do with any acts of violence that are committed in its name."
Is it still racism to condemn a white Muslim terrorist?

Police shoot dead 16yo armed with a knife in Perth, premier suggests teen was radicalised online : r/australian - "What type of radical was he? The article doesn’t say. I will have to assume he was a radical Buddhist"

Meme - Wanjiru Njoya @WanjiruNjoya: "I was a quiet academic in rural Devon until I was radicalized by white liberals telling me I must kneel down for George Floyd and pledge allegiance to a group of semi literate commies called Black Lives Matter. To which my answer was: NO. What "radicalized" you?"
i/o @eyeslasho: "Discovering that liberals deny and suppress scientific and statistical information more than conservatives do, and do this with the assistance of the most influential institutions in America, and that the consequences of this denial are far-reaching and profoundly deleterious."
Big-Brain Politics on X - "It's shocking how prevalent manipulation of data is & academic dishonesty to fit some narrative. Recent example: blacks commit most violent crimes but now statistics/studies rather show blacks are the most VICTIMS of violent crimes as if it's structural racism that's the problem"

RandomSprint on X - "A disproportionate share of terrorists are engineers.  I remember reading this in 2010 and updating from "being smart leads to better beliefs" to "there are traps only smart people can fall for."  I am often reminded of this fact."
wanye on X - "This debate was formative for me. After 911 it was conventional wisdom on the left that people became terrorists because of privation, lack of resources. And it literally just didn’t matter how many of them had engineering degrees or how many of the people in the planes on 911 had been educated in the west or came from wealthy families. You could repeat it until your face turned blue and the very next day you’d hear them saying again that terrorism stems from lack of resources.  Progressives have one and one answer only for everything. It’s their answer for international terrorism. And it’s their answer when your car is broken into. It’s the same stupid answer every time — never right, never updated, never thought through."
More money means more opportunities for grifters, after all

Meme - christoph @Halalcoholism: "Tremendous content today as a preteen girl becomes a target for the type of twitter user who likes to tweet about “Wypipo”. Her crime: daring to perform an Indonesian dance. The reaction in Indonesian twitter was quite different."
Anti Cheetah Pee @EddieRuffinJr: "🤦🏾‍♂️ white ppl always messing with other ppl culture ! 😩😩"
Readers added context they thought people might want to know: "The girl in the video, Daisy Oxenstierna, is a Swedish-Indonesian dancer who lives in Bali and speaks the local language fluently. She is here pefroming Legong, a style of Balinese dance characterised by exaggerated hand movements and facial expressions."
clown @clowninfinite: "as someone who's not only Balinese but has practiced this dance, honestly stfu u guys are the ones dunking on a TEENAGER and moreover making fun of the parts of the dance which is hmmmm idk racist?"
@eajhyuk: "Im a balinese myself, and I can dance to Balinese dance. Fyi this Balinese dance called Tari Condong. The bold expression and the eyes movement are the point of the dance. I don't think she is messing up. Who you are to judge her"
Poor, ignorant Indonesians, who are too stupid to know how cultural appropriation hurts them through structural violence

Meme - iamyesyouareno @iamyesyouareno: "Forget about mass immigration and replacement, forget about soaring crime rates, forget about invasive cultures, forget about the high-trust society, forget about your traditions, forget about your history, forget about your future. Let everything perish, but remember that the most dangerous thing of all is the rise of the far-right. — the mainstream media."
"Across Europe, the far right is rising. That it seems normal is all the more terrifying"
Unsurprisingly, it's by Owen Jones and it is even less substantial than the NYT piece linked below

Just How Dangerous Is Europe’s Rising Far Right? - The New York Times - "Jordan Bardella, 28, is the new face of the far right in France. Measured, clean-cut and raised in the hardscrabble northern suburbs of Paris, he laces his speeches with references to Victor Hugo and believes that “no country succeeds by denying or being ashamed of itself.”... In the Netherlands, Geert Wilders, who has called Moroccan immigrants “scum,” won national elections in November at the head of his Party for Freedom, and center-right parties there have agreed to negotiate with him to form a governing coalition... “The normalization of the right does not necessarily make it less extreme,” said Ms. Tocci, the Italian political scientist. “If constraints loosen, perhaps with the return of Trump as president in November, Meloni will be more than happy to show her true face. If Trump and Orban agree to force Ukraine to surrender, she will not think twice.”
The same people who claim you can't link the US Democratic party to its racist roots because the parties switched in the 60s keep going on about the "fascist roots" of modern "far right" parties. This and being "anti-immigrant" (with no substantiation or context, except the telling condemnation of deporting illegal immigrants) are the only points this hit piece manages to come up with (Orban aside), of course with no counterpoint. We also see a curious conflation between the "right" and the "far right" - because of course if you are right of Stalin, you're a Nazi (unsurprisingly, it's accompanied by a conspiracy theory)
If you don't think your country should deny or be ashamed of itself, you are "far right". We're still told that left wingers don't hate their countries
Of course, Geert Wilders didn't actually say all Moroccans were scum, but that's the usual left wing calumny

Dutch Politician Slammed for Calling Moroccan Immigrants 'Scum' - ""If a Dutch person driving in a car drives five miles too fast, he will be fined within a minute whereas the Moroccan scum in Holland — once again, not all are scum, but there is a lot of Moroccan scum in Holland who makes the streets unsafe, mostly young people and they are not taken seriously," Wilders said at his first campaign event, in the blue-collar town of Spijkenisse."

Moroccan Organised Crime in the Netherlands - "The article discusses organized crime in the Dutch delta; delinquency among Moroccan boys; Moroccans and organized crime; Dutch policy and the distribution of hashish; and the Ramola case, which involved a Moroccan group in Rotterdam that ran an international organization trafficking in hashish, heroin, and cocaine. As this case study of Moroccan involvement in drug trafficking suggests, families can perform a key role in transnational organized crime: (1) patriarchal and extended family structures are particularly suited to the mobilization of such networks; (2) family networks of production and distribution are highly resistant to penetration and disturbance by law enforcement agencies; (3) use of family networks minimizes the need for physical violence and corruption; and (4) incentives for involvement in transnational organized crime can be found in the cultural and political environment of the countries in which immigrant communities settle"
This racist anti-immigrant article from 1998 is claiming that all Moroccans in the Netherlands are criminals

Meme - Stephen Knight: "When people normalise censorship, cancellation or violence towards their ideological opponents, they don't seem to realise they are merely announcing the new rules of engagement to their enemies."

Some Surprising Data on Black Americans - "The Democratic Party has very slowly seen their grip on Asian, Hispanic and Black voters slipping as of late...
66% of Black Democrats believe sex is immutable and assigned at birth.
62% of Black Americans believe race should NOT be a factor in college admissions.
38% of Black Americans believe police funding should be INCREASED; 38% believe funding should remain as is; only 23% want it decreased.
In 2021, 65% of Black Americans believed that increased attention given to inequality had NOT led to changes for the better for Black Americans.
64% of Black adults feel that the ‘racial reckoning’ and focus on identity has NOT led to positive changes.
Only 29% of Black Democrats identify as ‘liberal’ within the party. (Compared with 55% of Whites.)
Currently, there has been a roughly 11% drop in Black voter support of the Democratic Party, dropping from 90% to 79%.
55% of Black Americans believe Democrats should work hard to find common ground with Republicans, versus only 41% who feel Democrats should proceed with their agenda no matter what...
White lefties are turning Black voters off, big time. If white liberals keep being paternalistic and keep ignoring what Black voters actually want, and how these voters think and feel, Dems are going to be in trouble."

Pickering councillor faces backlash after penning op-ed criticizing Black History Month celebrations - "A Pickering city councillor is facing backlash from community members and her council colleagues after penning an op-ed saying she does not support the concept of Black History Month, which led to public outcry and some demanding an apology.  In the op-ed, which was published online Sunday in the Oshawa Durham Central Newspaper, Coun. Lisa Robinson denounced the idea of celebrating Black History Month, arguing that "the race to equality is not the celebration of one race over another. "We are so hung up on North American history and the historical trafficking of primarily African people that we have lost sense of time and period," she wrote.  "Back in those days society was very different. Today, we have come a long way.""
These are the people who complain about "white fragility"

How a confederate flag painted on a rock could cost a mom her kid - "A New York mom is caught between a rock and an appellate court.  The upstate woman has been told she needs to ditch a driveway decoration painted with a confederate flag or risk losing custody of her mixed race child — even though a family court judge didn’t consider it to be an issue when it was raised during trial...   The parents — identified only as Christie and Isaiah in the documents — have long had joint legal custody of the girl, born in 2014, but the mother wants the dad to only see his daughter every other weekend, and the father wants sole custody...   Jason Leifer, the lawyer representing the child, said it was like the appellate judges “pulled something out of a hat” because the rock was never the subject of the parents’ disagreements... Regardless of its symbolism, Michael Stutman, an attorney specializing in matrimonial law and the current chair of the New York City Bar Association’s Matrimonial Law Committee, told The Post he thinks the judges made “a very dangerous statement.” “I think that it is a rather astonishing extension of wokeness in now that the door seems to be opening that someone’s political viewpoint reflects on their fitness as a parent,” Stutman said. “It is one of the clearest infringements on someone’s free speech by the state to have a court threaten to restrict a parents’ rights to their child based upon … the propriety of a person’s political beliefs. “I don’t think that such a decision would ever stand constitutional challenge,” he said. “You could easily find a conservative court saying that a person who flies a rainbow pride flag on their front door is an unfit parent because that judge does not believe in sexual choices, say, that are beyond that of just males and females,” the lawyer added."

Opinion | Can the Left Be Happy? - The New York Times - "A crucial moment in the development of modern left-wing culture arrived some time in 2013, when Ta-Nehisi Coates, reading books about the ravages and aftermath of World War II by the historians Tony Judt and Timothy Snyder, realized that he didn’t believe in God.  “I don’t believe the arc of the universe bends towards justice,” Coates wrote for The Atlantic then. “I don’t even believe in an arc. I believe in chaos … I don’t know that it all ends badly. But I think it probably does.”...  in his crisis of faith, his refusal of optimism, you see the question that has hung over left-wing culture throughout a period in which its influence over many American institutions has markedly increased: Does it make any sense for a left-winger to be happy?  The left-wing temperament is, by nature, unhappier than the moderate and conservative alternatives. The refusal of contentment is essential to radical politics; the desire to take the givens of the world and make something better out of them is always going to be linked to less relaxed gratitude, than to more of a discontented itch. But the 20th century left had two very different anchors in a fundamental optimism: the Christianity of the American social gospel tradition, which influenced New Deal liberalism and infused the civil rights movement, and the Marxist conviction that the iron logic of historical development would eventually bring about a secular utopia — trust the science (of socialism)! What’s notable about the left in the 2020s is that neither anchor is there anymore. The secularization of left-wing politics has made the kind of Christian-inflected cosmic optimism that still defined, say, Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign seem increasingly irrelevant or cringe-worthy. Meanwhile, the revival of Marxism and socialism has not been accompanied by any obvious recovery of faith in a Marxist science of history. I know many people on the left who think Marx was right about capitalism’s contradictions; I know many fewer who share his expectation that the dialectic will yield a worker’s paradise. Instead you have a fear that when “late capitalism” crashes, it will probably take everybody down with it, a sense we should be “learning to die” as the climate crisis worsens, a belief in white supremacy as an original sin without the clear promise of redemption... amid the recent trend toward increasing youth unhappiness, the left-right happiness gap is wider than before — that whatever is making young people unhappier (be it smartphones, climate change, secularism or populism), the effect is magnified the further left you go. The smartphone theory of increasing youth unhappiness has been especially in the news... it’s been striking how certain critiques of Haidt’s theory from the left seem to object to the idea that youth unhappiness could be anything but rational and natural... This seems like where a good portion of the American left finds itself today: comforted by neither God nor history, and hoping vaguely that therapy can take their place."

Meme - Venn Diagrams: "Lockdowner, Hormone blocks for kids, Loves Hamas & the Islamic Republic". Intersection: "Woke left"

“First they came for the bird names. . .” Woke craziness creeps into bird taxonomy - "The latest gambit of Woke politics is to trawl back through everyone’s history, and, if you find something unsavory, that person must be canceled...  when you do that with scientific names, it causes a problem.  Sometimes a “problematic” person is part of a species’ name, either the common name like Audubon’s shearwater (Puffinus lherminieri), or both the common name and the Latin binomial, like these birds: Audubon’s warbler (Setophaga auduboni), Townsend’s warbler (Setophaga townsendi), Hammond’s flycatcher (Empidonax hammondii) , and McCown’s longspur (Rhynchophanes mccownii). These names confer instant communication between birders and other biologists, and the Latin binomials are entrenched in the literature and can’t be changed without a taxonomic revision that shows why the name is somehow taxonomically incorrect (the species might, for example, have been previously described under another name).   I used these names because, in a new op-ed in the Washington Post, two birders have proposed canceling at least the common names of the species given above (and of course why not the Latin names?), for they’re named after people who did bad things in the past. (The authors are described as “ornithologists and birders who created the website Bird Names for Birds.”)... The upside, which is somehow seen as perpetuating racism (seriously? Does this do that?), has to be balanced against the palpable confusion of renaming not just these bird species, but every species on Earth named after someone “whose actions don’t align with modern values.” That is, if there even exists an upside, and here I can’t see a meaningful one.  The fact is that even our own actions today won’t align with moral values in 150 years... when I ask Grania’s Question: “Does the proposed change palpably change society for the better?”, I have to say no. Taxonomic pecksniffery is a waste of time, and I feel sorry for those who feel it’s an important endeavor. It does nothing to ameliorate or eliminate racism. It is virtue flaunting, pure and simple. (I guessed that both authors were white, and I was right.)...
“First they came for the bird names, and I did not tweet""
First, they came for the Confederate Generals...

Meme - NPCs: "FREE SPEECH IS DANGEROUS UNLESS LIBERALS CONTROL IT"

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